Phrases

like a moth to the flame

He argued that as the British and Irish governments were transfixed by the peace process like a moth to the flame, the Sinn Fein leadership, playing by its own rules, benefited from the permanent instability.

But (and here is the contradiction) simply by hating it, I am drawn to it like a moth to the flame.

She felt like a moth to the flame, knowing that the more time she spent with him, the more battered her world would become.

Origin

In Anglo-Saxon times a moth was any parasitic pest such as a maggot or worm, especially the larva of the clothes moth. The name eventually extended to the adult clothes moth, and then to other similar insects. People have been able to use a mothball to protect stored clothes since the 1890s; shortly after that in mothballs came to mean ‘unused but kept in good condition for future use’. Compare butterfly